Week 5: Applying Materials & Light
This week I started with setting up the environmental light using the Arnold sky dome. It actually took me quite a while to find the right HDR image for my scene that is free to use because most HDR images that I can find captures day time instead of night scene. So in the end I just used the one from hdrlabs.com called Milkyway. This might be temporary for now depending on if I can find a better one later in the following weeks.
I tried scaling the dome to appropriately fit the proportion in comparison to the rest of the elements here, but somehow the scale seems a little off when I am not selecting the sky dome. When the sky dome is selected, the scale of the background is smaller than if not selected on the rendering, so I am not quite sure what is happening here.
Then I created separate Arnold materials for the tree trunk and the leaves and have them assigned to all the trees. I referred to this tutorial for this process.
Right now the color of the tree leaves is pink because I am using the original jpg from the 3D model that I downloaded, as it is a cherry blossom tree, but later on I will change it to more of an orange color in order to complement it with the dark blue atmospheric color of the overall scene, making it more dramatic. As for the texture of the terrain, I think currently the jpg of the texture is very small and it is repeating throughout the surface plane, so I will have to figure out how to fix this, possibly using UV mapping. For the moon, I used the Arnold mesh light and applied it to the duplicated object. The light effect that got reflected onto the terrain is more of a hard light and dramatic but I might try to make it softer and diffuse a little more.
At some point my Maya crashed and when I reopened it, suddenly since then whenever the screen is at viewport mode and nothing is selected, somehow the moon stays highlighted with a red mesh, not sure if this is something I should concern about because it does not show when being rendered through Arnold.
